Related papers: Semi-Implicit Variational Inference

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…

Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…

Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…

Simulation-based inference (SBI) refers to statistical inference on stochastic models for which we can generate samples, but not compute likelihoods. Like SBI algorithms, generative adversarial networks (GANs) do not require explicit…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…

Semi-implicit graph variational auto-encoder (SIG-VAE) is proposed to expand the flexibility of variational graph auto-encoders (VGAE) to model graph data. SIG-VAE employs a hierarchical variational framework to enable neighboring node…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…

Transformation-based methods have been an attractive approach in non-parametric inference for problems such as unconditional and conditional density estimation due to their unique hierarchical structure that models the data as flexible…

Stochastic Interpolants (SI) is a powerful framework for generative modeling, capable of flexibly transforming between two probability distributions. However, its use in jointly optimized latent variable models remains unexplored as it…

The Cut posterior and related Semi-Modular Inference are Generalised Bayes methods for Modular Bayesian evidence combination. Analysis is broken up over modular sub-models of the joint posterior distribution. Model-misspecification in…

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…

Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…